Bruce Kogut, the director of the School's Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics, discusses the center's latest perspective about making the financial sector work for Wall Street and Main Street after the financial crisis.

Last fall a panel of high-powered finance experts??including bank executives, regulators, politicians, journalists and a Nobel laureate in economics??assembled at Columbia??s Miller Theatre to participate in a panel titled ??Financial Innovation: A Risky Business??

"Those in a homogeneous group put much less effort into the task at hand in part because they were more interested in avoiding conflict. Diverse environments allowed people to focus on the task instead of their social relationship."

"If a firm already has one woman in a top management position, then the odds that another woman will also have a top position is lower. It’s as if women are over-distributed among firms, or spread out more evenly than chance alone would dictate.”